Host Nick Jeelvy welcomed long-time Counter-Currents writer James J. O’Meara, a smooth-talking warmage and friend of the show, for a discussion of Better Call Saul and what it means for white identitarians and nationalists.
Topics discussed include:
00:00 Introductions
00:10 Harry Truman
00:14 Crypsis
00:20 Language in Medieval Europe
00:25 Better Call Saul
00:30 Courtroom procedure
00:32 Spoiler Alert
00:37 Lawyer demographics
00:42 Listener donations
00:45 Law school and credentials
00:55 People skills vs. book smarts
01:00 Jimmy and Mike in Better Call Saul
01:05 Genetics and character
01:08 Saul causes collateral damage
01:12 Causality
01:17 The cast’s ethnic composition
01:25 Weaknesses of the WASPs
01:30 Jewish/Irish takeover
01:35 Anglo-Saxon delusions about assimilation
01:48 Everyone’s a con man in America
01:53 American sales style
02:09 What James is working on
To listen in a player, click here. To download, right-click the link and click “save as.”
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Thanks for this very enjoyable podcast from two of the best writers and podcasters at Counter-Currents.
As someone who was born and bred West of the Pecos from “Mormon” pioneer ancestors, I will have to take a strong exception to the common characterization that the American West was somehow stolen from the Injuns or that they were Genocided mysteriously.
That corporate Marxists in the Universities require fealty and submission to these now-mainstream “decolonization” mantras does not make the tales of the past more true.
If you look at a nighttime satellite image of the lower 48 states, you will see from the electric light pollution that other than the Left Coast, hardly anybody actually lives West of Dodge. “Rain does not follow the plow,” as the Pioneer saying goes.
It wasn’t any easier for Stone Age people to live here than it was for the pale-faced Pioneers, but the latter thrived.
The United States is not to be confused demographically with Mesoamerica or South America. Europeans have an unfortunate tendency to fetishize aboriginals and other non-Whites, including Africans. So if you don’t see any Native American Wakanda where the casino now stands, I am not sure that it’s really the White Man who is to blame.
My Dad was from Western Colorado from the fruited banks of the eponymous River, and he and my Uncle became some of the bumper crop of aerospace and nuclear engineers that went to college when the Russians launched Sputnik into orbit in 1957. They were quite proud of their contributions to Americans putting a Man on the Moon, and I can’t remember anything more exciting as a kid to see it on TV. I had the Apollo 11 lunchbox at school, and later as a teenager in the Civil Air Patrol we were given a ride in a C-130 from the Air Force Base in Idaho and a tour of Mission Control in Houston.
I grew up in the 1960s and ’70s living in various places like Las Vegas, Nevada where Dad was employed crunching data from nuclear weapons tests ─ and later, Albuquerque, New Mexico and Tucson, Arizona. Eventually my Dad landed a job at the Idaho National Laboratory and my Mom, being a third-generation Idaho farm girl refused to leave ever again. Idaho is a big magnet to wealthy Right Wing Californians right now ─ meaning Right Wing by California standards, I guess.
This is not exactly a new phenomenon. I watched all these communities explode in size from their original frontier towns long before people had ever heard of neon lights and air conditioning.
Las Vegas, Nevada, founded in 1905, was a waypoint along the Mormon Trail from Salt Lake City to Los Angeles. Tucson was actually a Spanish town founded in 1775, but the mild Winter climate and milder-than-Phoenix Summer heat made it a a nice place to study or start a research park. If I remember correctly, Francis Parker Yockey was a student at the University of Arizona in Tucson for a year.
Sante Fe, founded in 1610, is the capital of New Mexico, and it’s not far from another “meadow” town besides the familiar one in the Mojave Desert that is also called Las Vegas. Sante Fe sits at an altitude of 7,199 feet, the highest state capital in the country. Albuquerque is about hundred miles away from Sante Fe but crucially sits on the Rio Grande, it being the largest city in New Mexico.
If my Dad had any thoughts about leaving the so-call “Mormon Corridor” in the Intermountain West to go to some place like the East Coast or the Left Coast to pursue his engineering career, he might as well have also filed for divorce in the process. This kind of limited his professional prospects to government or military contractors.
Although he didn’t really like the military culture much, and preferred working on scientific projects like the Apollo rockets that went to the Moon or the Space Shuttle, my Dad didn’t really mind working on military hardware such as the Minuteman ICBM because he felt that the nukes enabled the country to deliver a massive wallop to a Communist enemy ─ if it ever came down to brass tacks. So far this kind of deterrence has been incontestable.
So government defense contracts and the stability or instability that came with this kind of employment went with my upbringing, and I’ve been waiting for the great reset for the last fifty years ─ where you would need a wheelbarrow full of Reichsmarks to buy a loaf of bread or a jug of gasoline, and maybe you’d better get in line quick before you need two wheelbarrows.
The LDS come from a culture of self- and community-reliance near the “end of days,” and you are expected to store a year’s supply of food and to help your neighbors as necessary. They don’t have hurricanes in Idaho but our family helped stack sandbags when the Teton Dam failed in Idaho in 1976, and it looked like the evacuation of Saigon the previous year.
In 1971, during the aerospace and technology recession that predated the first Arab oil embargo in 1973, my Dad gave some serious consideration to dropping the engineering profession altogether. Some of his once highly-regarded and now redundant engineering friends were actually talking about going together on and opening up an old-fashioned Texaco service station franchise on a magical highway somewhere. That phase passed quickly, but had they gone through with it, the adventure would have capsized like the Poseidon when the oil crisis hit a couple of years later. Big Box stores and Indian (subcontinent) convenience store cartels have now replaced the Mom and Pop stores. And the recent Covid lockdowns shuttered the rest of them.
When the last men were landing on the Moon, my Dad got hired by a fancy HHM-style CPA firm. The boss wanted him to display his degrees in Mathematics and Statistics to hang on the wall and impress the well-heeled clients at the Firm. I remember going with him to the big mainframe computer center at the University of Arizona to write code with boxes and boxes of IBM punch cards. I still have some of them today. Dad even considered giving up engineering and becoming a Certified Public Accountant. They made more money than Engineers.
But his conclusion was that all of the lucrative CPA jobs out West were ultimately via government-driven contracts just the same, so he might as well go back to building rockets or ensuring the reliability of nukes, which at least was interesting and useful. You even got bragging rights about Top Secret security clearances.
In Idaho, where peaceful nuclear power was first demonstrated after WWII, he mostly worked on reactor safety until the Space Shuttle explosion. Then he went back to his first job at Thiokol to redesign the solid-rocket boosters, which we not designed to launch after a rare Florida freeze. Fixing disasters tends to command higher salaries than successes. One of his colleagues had a Corvette that Dad thought was cool, but after driving it for a week when his friend was out of town, he was not too impressed. He prefers a basic pickup truck.
Howard Hamlin, the prosperous attorney of the law firm in the fictional Better Call Saul world, probably liked driving his Jaguar around town in Albuquerque. This is something that would be better suited for Rodeo Drive in Hollywood than a watering hole like Albuquerque where you don’t even want to leave a moving van or SUV somewhere dodgy overnight because it WILL get stolen.
I wouldn’t necessarily fault Howard for wanting to be a big fish in a little pond. He was probably a more talented attorney than he seems to be with his “Namast3” license plate. Chuck McGill, the other HHM law-firm partner and Jimmy/Saul’s older brother, came from Chicago to practice law in Albuquerque of all places.
Well, does anybody really want to live in Chicago?
One of my History professors studied at Kent State in Ohio when the famous 1970 Vietnam War protest and National Guard shootings occurred. He and his psychologist wife could have probably gone anywhere to teach but they chose to live out West instead.
I asked a professor emeritus at State U once why it was that any good PhD who had good credentials from Georgetown or Cornell or wherever would ever want to spend their career right here in River City.
He said that in Pocatello, Idaho or Tempe, Arizona, or Las Cruces, New Mexico, you can make a big difference in a “modest but meaningful” way ─ but you were just one of the many over-educated drones at Cambridge or Columbia if you taught there. And besides, “who wants to catch the subway into Manhattan every day?”
Or dodge the poop on the Streets of San Francisco, LOL.
My ancestors settled this land and got medals for the rare fights they had with the Injuns. To this day I have been all along the old U.S. Route 66 highway that runs from Chicago to the Santa Monica pier in Los Angeles. A lot of my neighbors in Arizona now are retirees who came from places like Chicago ─ but I can’t say that I really want to even visit there. L.A. is at least fun to visit once in awhile.
And I am not sure that the crime rate in Maricopa County, Arizona is any better than in Bernalillo County, New Mexico. Albuquerque has a current population of about 600 thousand, the largest city in the state ─ but it is surrounded by a lot of space and a lot of livestock. There are more cows in New Mexico than there are people. Albuquerque still has a suburban vibe and feel to it. When I lived there in the 1960s it was about 250 thousand. The population in the Southwest has been exploding, but not so much in New Mexico, where hardly anybody goes expecting to find work.
When the United States annexed the Southwest from Mexico after the 1846 war, there were only about ten thousand native Spanish speakers in the whole territory ─ and most of these were from places like Los Angeles, Albuquerque, and Santa Fe ─ the New Mexican capital, which today has a modest population of less than 90 thousand.
The Americans paid cash for the land and they thought they were being charitable to do so. The Mehicans also got a share of water rights to the Colorado and the Rio Grande rivers. That river water is agricultural gold in the West, then and now.
A few years later the Mexicans needed some more money and wanted to sell some more wasteland, including access to the Gulf of California. Congress didn’t see the need for that and only added the Gadsden strip of land for a Southern transcontinental railroad that included Tucson, founded by the Spanish in 1775.
Northerners in Congress also did not like the idea of Southern expansion, so the Southern transcontinental railroad was not completed until 1881 in the territorial county just West of Las Cruces, NM. Today Interstate 10 from Los Angeles, Phoenix and Tucson meets I-25 at Las Cruces and connects to El Paso, Texas.
If you want to go to the Sea of Cortez the closest you are going to come in Arizona is the old territorial prison at Yuma, which is near the confluence of the Colorado and Gila rivers. Rocky Point over the Mexican border has better beachfront access, of course, no thanks to Congress.
In the 19th century, the Americans were able to buy land cheaply from the Russians as well when nobody imagined that Anchorage, Alaska would be a strategic world airline crossroads. However, General Billy Mitchell saw the potential of aerial trade routes there.
Yeah, Congress was not always visionary, and usually pedantically bourgeois ─ but in any case, we did not cheat the French, Mexicans, or the Russians out of anything.
And most of these frontier towns did not go up as quickly as Las Vegas, Nevada ─ which tripled in population from 30 thousand in the 1950s, and almost trebled again in the 1960s, then doubling every decade for rest of the 20th century. Clark County at over 2 million in population now accounts for the demographic nexus of the entire 3 million state of Nevada today. As I remember in 1966, there were not more than one or two Negroes at my grade school which is now on the UNLV campus.
In Albuquerque in 1968, there was never any doubt that the language was English. I don’t recall hearing Spanish spoken, nor do I remember Whites with Hispanic surnames. I do remember that everybody had a green lawn. Today, my old house has desert landscaping ─ as does the fictional Walter White residence which is about four miles away. This is pretty much standard nowadays everywhere. Jesse Pinkman’s house still has a nice lawn but it is in the Old Town section of Albuquerque near the Rio Grande.
On the high desert at an elevation just beating Denver at the base of the Sandia mountains and nestled along the Rio Grande, Albuquerque has a mild climate with very little snow. It is not surprising that the region attracted eccentric tomboy artists and atomic scientists at a time before air conditioning and smog became common. Sometimes people came for the altitude and dry air to nurse their tuberculosis. Doc Holiday lived for a while in Las Vegas, New Mexico.
The first atomic bomb was detonated on the Army proving grounds near the White Sands National Monument on July 16th, 1945 ─ and you can go there when they open the range to the public on a weekend in April and again around Columbus Day in October. If you go you can pick up pebbles of the green radioactive glass below your feet at the Trinity site today. This so-called “Trinitite” sells in local rock shops for hefty prices, but if you take any away from the Trinity Site itself under the noses of the military police it is actionable as theft of government property.
I like technology museums but there is other local lore. Smokey Bear got treed in a forest fire near there, and Billy the Kid killed the Lincoln County Sheriff near here. If you visit the living museum at Fort Stanton (1855), where they once fought Indians and had tuberculosis cabins during the Depression, and held prisoners of war during World War II, you will be greeted by docents wearing blue-bellied uniforms and telling you how “crazy, crazy” White settlement was in the territorial days when the U.S. Army supported it.
And if you have ever seen the dark sky on a dry night in the Cibola forest near Socorro where they have the Radio telescope dishes from the movie Contact, or on the high desert, maybe heading to Roswell on the Pecos River, you might understand why they see flying saucers and worlds far beyond the Milky Way.
I recommend the desert sunrise over the Organ Mountains at the New Mexico State college town on the Rio Grande near the SW corner of the White Sands monument and missile range. At the SE corner of the range is Alamogordo, and they have a rocketry museum.
The German scientist, Dr. Wernher von Braun was launching salvaged V2 missiles for the U.S. Army in the late 1940s and thinking about sending rockets to the Moon and worlds beyond. He fell in love with the Land of Enchantment.
A downside about the college town of Las Cruces is that you probably won’t be able to find anything besides a Mexican eatery or mediocre Chinese takeout ─ and Denny’s.
But at the Denny’s you will see groups of students gathered around the tables sipping iced tea and chatting with their favorite professors. A lot of aerospace students and rocketry hobbyists study here. The Mexican waiter was pretty proud to tell us that his daughter was studying STEM.
Roswell is a blighted and smallish agricultural town that probably got a lot of middle class stimulus because of the Army air base located there in the 1940s. The other industry is tourism. Their McDonalds restaurant is shaped like a flying saucer. Tourism was true of the New Mexico economy in general and it is still true today.
New Mexico has the highest number of PhDs per capita than any state in the Union. This is because the population is low and because of the military bases and the Los Alamos and Sandia National Laboratories. Without government spending, and the Route 66 or other tourism, I am not sure there would have been a Middle Class in New Mexico at all.
My Dad’s Uncle (RIP) was a tailgunner in the Navy who got shot down in the Pacific by the Japs and was immediately rescued by an American submarine. After the war he was a foreman for uranium mining in Grants, New Mexico, which was a Route 66 town between Winslow, Arizona and Albuquerque, New Mexico. Grants is the seat of Cibolo County, NM.
I passed through Grants for the first time in a half-century last year after the Covid lockdown, and it is a shell of a town now. There was a dive truck stop off Interstate 40, and the old businesses and old-style buildings on Route 66 are almost all shuttered. There are quite of few ranch-style homes built in the 1950s or 1960s, but about the only jobs of substance in Grants today are related to the county government. The uranium mining industry is at quiescent levels, and the social-justice narrative now is that the White man somehow screwed over the Injuns and took a radioactive dump on their lands.
Every time an Injun gets cancer he blames the mining and not the cigarettes. They like the royalties and leases from the highways and the pipelines and the casinos ─ but somehow they think that they are owed for living on the continent. Some of the more extreme narratives are that eugenics was being practiced in the boarding schools by the White Man back in the day.
In Tucson in the 1960s or ’70s, my Uncle’s employer got a government contract to make sense of Indian epidemiological data with an algorithm from a powerful mainframe computer. It seems that the medical data that Indians gave in the hospital was always bogus and statistically useless. It was thought that some kind of program could sift logically incompatible responses to questions and that this could improve the quality of the data to improve Native American nutrition and health. Eventually they had to give up because the database was too unreliable ─ Garbage-In/Garbage-Out is a hard and fast rule, and no magic will correct it after the fact. Even if their lives and health depended on it, Indians just never told the White Man the truth if a lie served better.
They finally solved this problem, however. All the health services had to do was hire Native American girls to ask the questions.
Anyway, the United States was settled by Protestants or offshoots like the Latter-Day Saints. Three-quarters of my family are LDS and they were pioneers going back generations. One ancestor starved and died of smallpox in a Union PoW camp and another one was the Moab, Utah sheriff who was murdered by outlaws. They farmed, ranched, worked iron, and mined gold and uranium. None of them ever owned slaves.
Idaho and Utah are some of the most Anglo parts of the country today because of this earlier immigration from England, Scotland, and Wales. Most of the other White parts of the country were settled from later waves of immigration and they actually have dominant German or maybe Irish populations.
So, I realize that from a perspective of the Latin Rite or Orthodox Christians, the USA seems founded on grift and flim-flam. My great-grandfather hailed from Scottish stock from the 18th century, and in Colorado after the Civil War he was a classmate of the Washington, DC socialite Evalyn Walsh McClean. His father was a blacksmith and he mined gold in Colorado and uranium in Utah ─ but unlike the Irish-born father of the young Miss Walsh, my ancestor never “struck it rich.” Instead of the Hope Diamond, my Grandparents bought a pickup truck that ran on coal-gas.
I would object that this mercurial or exploitational view of the American West has always been shaped by Hollywood and by various adventure novels such as Zane Grey. And maybe (just maybe) that story ain’t the full truth.
After visiting Custer’s Last Stand in Montana and the Cody museum in Wyoming last year, I learned that Buffalo hides made great transmission belts for the burgeoning 19th century mills. Interesting. I remember in school that we were taught that the Buffalo were exterminated just to starve out the Plains Indians. I can concede that wildlife management is a lot more sophisticated nowadays. But it also seems to me that American Indians were pretty fond of depleting their own natural resources and then just moving on to happier hunting grounds once they filthied it up.
It has also been a suppressed academic secret that the archaeological sites of the Noble Savages prove that they did practice cannibalism whenever they won a battle or whenever the rains did not come.
The main reason that Breaking Bad was set in Albuquerque is pretty simple: Albuquerque has vastly cheaper production costs than Los Angeles for film and television.
Albuquerque was once a waypoint along Route 66 for Okies escaping the Dust Bowl to go pick fruit in California. And despite New Mexico being known for growing world-class chili peppers and the famous Albuquerque hot-air balloon festival ─ which I don’t think was even mentioned in either TV series ─ I do think that there is some truth to the stereotypes that made Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul so interesting.
There is a drug smuggling corridor along the Rio Grande River valley, which is along the modern day Interstate 25 that runs North from Las Cruces to Albuquerque to Sante Fe, and then jogs around the Eastern slope of the Rockies past Denver, Colorado and on to Northern Wyoming.
The Walter White character was a High School Chemistry teacher and tech genius who got cheated out of his share of the startup they created by his Jewish partner, Elliot Schwartz and his Jewish wife, Gretchen, who used to be Walt’s research assistant ─ and I assume that she was also Walt’s ex-girlfriend. I suspected that this was the real reason that Walt petulantly cashed out his stake of the future billion-dollar Gray Matter Technologies before it paid off.
As mentioned before, New Mexico has the most PhDs per capita than any other state in the Union because of the National Laboratories and Weapons Labs located there since WWII. There is indeed some culture of high-tech grift here, but this wildly risks overstating the case, I think, compared to Silicon Valley in California.
I will give a classic example: Harvard dropout Bill Gates and his Seattle High School buddy, Paul Allen started Microsoft in Albuquerque in 1975.
Paul Allen was hired by a technology startup called MITS which sold calculator kits and model rocketry telemetry kits to hobbyists. MITS (or Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems) was itself founded by two officers at the Weapons Laboratory at Albuquerque’s Kirtland Air Force Base.
The MITS name was deliberately meant to suggest the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) of Cambridge, Massachusetts. The MIT Provost in the 1930s was Dr. Vannevar Bush, and unlike the Ivy League schools, they emphasized Middle Class scientific and engineering focus instead. In 1941, Dr. Bush was appointed by President Roosevelt to head the OSRD or the Office of Research and Development, which birthed ideas like atomic energy and radar. Dr. Bush was the co-founder of Raytheon Technologies Corporation in 1922, which started developing refrigeration technology and then went into Electronics.
MITS (or Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems) was founded in 1969 and did not have such an illustrious pedigree as MIT or Raytheon. MITS was a project of two Albuquerque Air Force Weapons Lab officers. One was Ed Roberts, a future medical doctor who invented the first commercially successful microcomputer in 1974. When MITS was bought out in the late 1970s for a few million dollars, Roberts became a simple country doctor in Georgia.
The other Kirtland Air Force Base Weapons Laboratory officer was Forrest Mims III, a Houston, Texas-born son of an Air Force pilot whose college degree was not even in the sciences or engineering. He built an analog computer for a High School Science Fair, and his name may be familiar to those like myself who bought electronics hobbyist books from the now-defunct Radio Shack stores in the 1970s. Forrest Mims is still writing Science articles today, and his electronics reference books are essential for electronics students and hobbyists.
In the 1968s when I lived in Albuquerque, Mims was volunteering at the Model Rocketry Club at the High School a few miles away. This is what the big kids were doing in those days. At the old Army commissary building when I visited Los Alamos after the Covid lockdown last year, the youth center located there featured a Tranny Pride flag of some kind. Times have sure changed.
Anyway, MITS (again, not to be confused with the illustrious MIT) was founded in 1969 in Albuquerque and in 1975 they were paying Paul Allen about 30 thousand dollars a year to write code for them, which would be over 160 thousand in today’s dollars. Seasoned engineers at Sandia Labs like my Dad were not making much more than this.
Paul Allen and his childhood friend, the Harvard dropout, Bill Gates then contracted with MITS to write the software for the operating system of a home computer kit called the Altair ─ which was way beyond the capability of most hobbyists, and cost almost a thousand dollars in 1970s money. I remember seeing the advertisement for the Altair 8800 in the 1975 issue of Popular Electronics magazine. I didn’t like all the digital crap, though. I wondered, “Where did all the Ham Radio stuff go?”
Radio Shack soon marketed the TRS-80 home computer circa 1977, as did Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak with their Apple. In 1981, the International Business Machines corporation (IBM) contracted with Microsoft to write the software for their IBM-PC or “personal computer,” by which time Gates and Allen had left Albuquerque and skedaddled back to the Evergreen State.
Like Apple’s Steve Jobs, Bill Gates always had a flair for the monetization angle of technology. In 1976, he wrote his epic “Open Letter to Hobbyists.” Gates resented the way that hobbyist culture shared or “ripped-off” software. Microsoft negotiated their contracts to always make sure that they got their beaks wet in the operating system world and its repairs/updates. This was not unlike private firms licensing the alphabet for monetization ─ or at least this is why we have to reinvent the wheel in computing lest it become de facto public domain. Nigger Tech keeps the cash flowing to the “creators” and insures that the code is kept as inelegant as humanly possible. Getting an open-ended paycheck is what Bill Gates unironically calls “craftsmanship.”
When the late Paul Allen got his first bout with cancer in 1983, master Gates tried to buy out his stock for peanuts. Allen refused, unlike TV’s Walter White, and Allen became a billionaire when Microsoft’s stock went public.
I remember taking Electronic courses at about this time and we had great trepidation about the new computer age bringing Orwell’s long-awaited 1984 to pass. But we felt that there was no way that this would happen with the personal home computer, LOL. Each computer would be ours to own and control and not connected to any interactive government grid or corporate network. Nobody was thinking about being connected to Big Brother via the Internet in those days, LOL.
One last point about the Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul TV franchise. Note that when they want to make women seem edgy they smoke cigarettes. Jesse’s girlfriend, Jane does this but then she is also a heroin user.
Skyler White takes up smoking as soon as she can after her “surprise” baby is born. Skyler wanted to make her own way professionally and she seemed to be in some sense in competition with Walt about how clever she is. When Walt “breaks bad” she knows that something is up with him and starts an affair with her ex boss whom she does not even respect, although he is a good single Dad.
Likewise, Kim Wexler is one of the cool kids and smokes while on breaks with Jimmy McGill at the HHM law-firm. I think she mostly gives up smoking when she quit practicing the law and left Jimmy/Saul for the pedestrian lifestyle at the lawn care company in Florida. Her sandals-and-white-socks boyfriend is a bit too bland to be believable, and I almost found it offensive writing. Is this supposed to be Kim’s post-Albuquerque penance for having been a bitch? Having a good cry on the airport shuttle bus makes it all better.
I am not sure if giving characters a cigarette habit is just lazy writing these days, but it is a quick way to make somebody decent seem edgy and transgressive, I guess.
Skyler’s nurse sister didn’t smoke as far as I can remember, but Marie was a liar and a kleptomaniac until Skyler started to get implicated in Walter’s vices, and her DEA agent husband Hank got shot and had to be taken care of. While convalescing, Hank did not collect rocks; he collected “minerals.” He acts like the tough secret agent but is in really a local nerd at heart.
I do sometimes like the way that Hollywood portrays White Trash in a realistic and not too judgmental way. At least, sometimes I do. The Coen Brothers films sometimes do this intelligently and humorously. But not always.
I am not sure they are being so explicit with Skyler, Marie, Hank, Kim Wexler, Mike Ehrmantraut (the principled but dirty ex-cop) or Werner Ziegler (the compromised German contractor and his naïve German wife, Margarethe) and so on.
But on some level aren’t they saying that the Gentiles of the American heartland ─ plus the Germans who do business with them ─ are basically high-agency White Trash?
Take Peter Schuler, a high executive for Madrigal Electromotive, the German company that distributes the American methamphetamine, He was busy evaluating dipping sauces as part of some marketing study at the office when he learns that the police are there to question him in the “Heisenberg” case, so he runs to the John and immediately commits suicide with a heart defibrillator kit.
I am not sure if this reminds me more of Al Bundy, the fictional TV born loser who sold women’s shoes ─ or the Jewish pedo-trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, who somehow taught at a NY college prep school without having a college degree, and who was found hanged in his prison cell a month after his arrest.
I am not sure if this is the “American Story” or not, but Bill Gates and Paul Allen became billionaires ─ while Ed Roberts and Forrest Mims, who as far as I’m concerned had greater talent, did not.
🙂
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1 comment
Thanks for this very enjoyable podcast from two of the best writers and podcasters at Counter-Currents.
As someone who was born and bred West of the Pecos from “Mormon” pioneer ancestors, I will have to take a strong exception to the common characterization that the American West was somehow stolen from the Injuns or that they were Genocided mysteriously.
That corporate Marxists in the Universities require fealty and submission to these now-mainstream “decolonization” mantras does not make the tales of the past more true.
If you look at a nighttime satellite image of the lower 48 states, you will see from the electric light pollution that other than the Left Coast, hardly anybody actually lives West of Dodge. “Rain does not follow the plow,” as the Pioneer saying goes.
It wasn’t any easier for Stone Age people to live here than it was for the pale-faced Pioneers, but the latter thrived.
The United States is not to be confused demographically with Mesoamerica or South America. Europeans have an unfortunate tendency to fetishize aboriginals and other non-Whites, including Africans. So if you don’t see any Native American Wakanda where the casino now stands, I am not sure that it’s really the White Man who is to blame.
My Dad was from Western Colorado from the fruited banks of the eponymous River, and he and my Uncle became some of the bumper crop of aerospace and nuclear engineers that went to college when the Russians launched Sputnik into orbit in 1957. They were quite proud of their contributions to Americans putting a Man on the Moon, and I can’t remember anything more exciting as a kid to see it on TV. I had the Apollo 11 lunchbox at school, and later as a teenager in the Civil Air Patrol we were given a ride in a C-130 from the Air Force Base in Idaho and a tour of Mission Control in Houston.
I grew up in the 1960s and ’70s living in various places like Las Vegas, Nevada where Dad was employed crunching data from nuclear weapons tests ─ and later, Albuquerque, New Mexico and Tucson, Arizona. Eventually my Dad landed a job at the Idaho National Laboratory and my Mom, being a third-generation Idaho farm girl refused to leave ever again. Idaho is a big magnet to wealthy Right Wing Californians right now ─ meaning Right Wing by California standards, I guess.
This is not exactly a new phenomenon. I watched all these communities explode in size from their original frontier towns long before people had ever heard of neon lights and air conditioning.
Las Vegas, Nevada, founded in 1905, was a waypoint along the Mormon Trail from Salt Lake City to Los Angeles. Tucson was actually a Spanish town founded in 1775, but the mild Winter climate and milder-than-Phoenix Summer heat made it a a nice place to study or start a research park. If I remember correctly, Francis Parker Yockey was a student at the University of Arizona in Tucson for a year.
Sante Fe, founded in 1610, is the capital of New Mexico, and it’s not far from another “meadow” town besides the familiar one in the Mojave Desert that is also called Las Vegas. Sante Fe sits at an altitude of 7,199 feet, the highest state capital in the country. Albuquerque is about hundred miles away from Sante Fe but crucially sits on the Rio Grande, it being the largest city in New Mexico.
If my Dad had any thoughts about leaving the so-call “Mormon Corridor” in the Intermountain West to go to some place like the East Coast or the Left Coast to pursue his engineering career, he might as well have also filed for divorce in the process. This kind of limited his professional prospects to government or military contractors.
Although he didn’t really like the military culture much, and preferred working on scientific projects like the Apollo rockets that went to the Moon or the Space Shuttle, my Dad didn’t really mind working on military hardware such as the Minuteman ICBM because he felt that the nukes enabled the country to deliver a massive wallop to a Communist enemy ─ if it ever came down to brass tacks. So far this kind of deterrence has been incontestable.
So government defense contracts and the stability or instability that came with this kind of employment went with my upbringing, and I’ve been waiting for the great reset for the last fifty years ─ where you would need a wheelbarrow full of Reichsmarks to buy a loaf of bread or a jug of gasoline, and maybe you’d better get in line quick before you need two wheelbarrows.
The LDS come from a culture of self- and community-reliance near the “end of days,” and you are expected to store a year’s supply of food and to help your neighbors as necessary. They don’t have hurricanes in Idaho but our family helped stack sandbags when the Teton Dam failed in Idaho in 1976, and it looked like the evacuation of Saigon the previous year.
In 1971, during the aerospace and technology recession that predated the first Arab oil embargo in 1973, my Dad gave some serious consideration to dropping the engineering profession altogether. Some of his once highly-regarded and now redundant engineering friends were actually talking about going together on and opening up an old-fashioned Texaco service station franchise on a magical highway somewhere. That phase passed quickly, but had they gone through with it, the adventure would have capsized like the Poseidon when the oil crisis hit a couple of years later. Big Box stores and Indian (subcontinent) convenience store cartels have now replaced the Mom and Pop stores. And the recent Covid lockdowns shuttered the rest of them.
When the last men were landing on the Moon, my Dad got hired by a fancy HHM-style CPA firm. The boss wanted him to display his degrees in Mathematics and Statistics to hang on the wall and impress the well-heeled clients at the Firm. I remember going with him to the big mainframe computer center at the University of Arizona to write code with boxes and boxes of IBM punch cards. I still have some of them today. Dad even considered giving up engineering and becoming a Certified Public Accountant. They made more money than Engineers.
But his conclusion was that all of the lucrative CPA jobs out West were ultimately via government-driven contracts just the same, so he might as well go back to building rockets or ensuring the reliability of nukes, which at least was interesting and useful. You even got bragging rights about Top Secret security clearances.
In Idaho, where peaceful nuclear power was first demonstrated after WWII, he mostly worked on reactor safety until the Space Shuttle explosion. Then he went back to his first job at Thiokol to redesign the solid-rocket boosters, which we not designed to launch after a rare Florida freeze. Fixing disasters tends to command higher salaries than successes. One of his colleagues had a Corvette that Dad thought was cool, but after driving it for a week when his friend was out of town, he was not too impressed. He prefers a basic pickup truck.
Howard Hamlin, the prosperous attorney of the law firm in the fictional Better Call Saul world, probably liked driving his Jaguar around town in Albuquerque. This is something that would be better suited for Rodeo Drive in Hollywood than a watering hole like Albuquerque where you don’t even want to leave a moving van or SUV somewhere dodgy overnight because it WILL get stolen.
I wouldn’t necessarily fault Howard for wanting to be a big fish in a little pond. He was probably a more talented attorney than he seems to be with his “Namast3” license plate. Chuck McGill, the other HHM law-firm partner and Jimmy/Saul’s older brother, came from Chicago to practice law in Albuquerque of all places.
Well, does anybody really want to live in Chicago?
One of my History professors studied at Kent State in Ohio when the famous 1970 Vietnam War protest and National Guard shootings occurred. He and his psychologist wife could have probably gone anywhere to teach but they chose to live out West instead.
I asked a professor emeritus at State U once why it was that any good PhD who had good credentials from Georgetown or Cornell or wherever would ever want to spend their career right here in River City.
He said that in Pocatello, Idaho or Tempe, Arizona, or Las Cruces, New Mexico, you can make a big difference in a “modest but meaningful” way ─ but you were just one of the many over-educated drones at Cambridge or Columbia if you taught there. And besides, “who wants to catch the subway into Manhattan every day?”
Or dodge the poop on the Streets of San Francisco, LOL.
My ancestors settled this land and got medals for the rare fights they had with the Injuns. To this day I have been all along the old U.S. Route 66 highway that runs from Chicago to the Santa Monica pier in Los Angeles. A lot of my neighbors in Arizona now are retirees who came from places like Chicago ─ but I can’t say that I really want to even visit there. L.A. is at least fun to visit once in awhile.
And I am not sure that the crime rate in Maricopa County, Arizona is any better than in Bernalillo County, New Mexico. Albuquerque has a current population of about 600 thousand, the largest city in the state ─ but it is surrounded by a lot of space and a lot of livestock. There are more cows in New Mexico than there are people. Albuquerque still has a suburban vibe and feel to it. When I lived there in the 1960s it was about 250 thousand. The population in the Southwest has been exploding, but not so much in New Mexico, where hardly anybody goes expecting to find work.
When the United States annexed the Southwest from Mexico after the 1846 war, there were only about ten thousand native Spanish speakers in the whole territory ─ and most of these were from places like Los Angeles, Albuquerque, and Santa Fe ─ the New Mexican capital, which today has a modest population of less than 90 thousand.
The Americans paid cash for the land and they thought they were being charitable to do so. The Mehicans also got a share of water rights to the Colorado and the Rio Grande rivers. That river water is agricultural gold in the West, then and now.
A few years later the Mexicans needed some more money and wanted to sell some more wasteland, including access to the Gulf of California. Congress didn’t see the need for that and only added the Gadsden strip of land for a Southern transcontinental railroad that included Tucson, founded by the Spanish in 1775.
Northerners in Congress also did not like the idea of Southern expansion, so the Southern transcontinental railroad was not completed until 1881 in the territorial county just West of Las Cruces, NM. Today Interstate 10 from Los Angeles, Phoenix and Tucson meets I-25 at Las Cruces and connects to El Paso, Texas.
If you want to go to the Sea of Cortez the closest you are going to come in Arizona is the old territorial prison at Yuma, which is near the confluence of the Colorado and Gila rivers. Rocky Point over the Mexican border has better beachfront access, of course, no thanks to Congress.
In the 19th century, the Americans were able to buy land cheaply from the Russians as well when nobody imagined that Anchorage, Alaska would be a strategic world airline crossroads. However, General Billy Mitchell saw the potential of aerial trade routes there.
Yeah, Congress was not always visionary, and usually pedantically bourgeois ─ but in any case, we did not cheat the French, Mexicans, or the Russians out of anything.
And most of these frontier towns did not go up as quickly as Las Vegas, Nevada ─ which tripled in population from 30 thousand in the 1950s, and almost trebled again in the 1960s, then doubling every decade for rest of the 20th century. Clark County at over 2 million in population now accounts for the demographic nexus of the entire 3 million state of Nevada today. As I remember in 1966, there were not more than one or two Negroes at my grade school which is now on the UNLV campus.
In Albuquerque in 1968, there was never any doubt that the language was English. I don’t recall hearing Spanish spoken, nor do I remember Whites with Hispanic surnames. I do remember that everybody had a green lawn. Today, my old house has desert landscaping ─ as does the fictional Walter White residence which is about four miles away. This is pretty much standard nowadays everywhere. Jesse Pinkman’s house still has a nice lawn but it is in the Old Town section of Albuquerque near the Rio Grande.
On the high desert at an elevation just beating Denver at the base of the Sandia mountains and nestled along the Rio Grande, Albuquerque has a mild climate with very little snow. It is not surprising that the region attracted eccentric tomboy artists and atomic scientists at a time before air conditioning and smog became common. Sometimes people came for the altitude and dry air to nurse their tuberculosis. Doc Holiday lived for a while in Las Vegas, New Mexico.
The first atomic bomb was detonated on the Army proving grounds near the White Sands National Monument on July 16th, 1945 ─ and you can go there when they open the range to the public on a weekend in April and again around Columbus Day in October. If you go you can pick up pebbles of the green radioactive glass below your feet at the Trinity site today. This so-called “Trinitite” sells in local rock shops for hefty prices, but if you take any away from the Trinity Site itself under the noses of the military police it is actionable as theft of government property.
I like technology museums but there is other local lore. Smokey Bear got treed in a forest fire near there, and Billy the Kid killed the Lincoln County Sheriff near here. If you visit the living museum at Fort Stanton (1855), where they once fought Indians and had tuberculosis cabins during the Depression, and held prisoners of war during World War II, you will be greeted by docents wearing blue-bellied uniforms and telling you how “crazy, crazy” White settlement was in the territorial days when the U.S. Army supported it.
And if you have ever seen the dark sky on a dry night in the Cibola forest near Socorro where they have the Radio telescope dishes from the movie Contact, or on the high desert, maybe heading to Roswell on the Pecos River, you might understand why they see flying saucers and worlds far beyond the Milky Way.
I recommend the desert sunrise over the Organ Mountains at the New Mexico State college town on the Rio Grande near the SW corner of the White Sands monument and missile range. At the SE corner of the range is Alamogordo, and they have a rocketry museum.
The German scientist, Dr. Wernher von Braun was launching salvaged V2 missiles for the U.S. Army in the late 1940s and thinking about sending rockets to the Moon and worlds beyond. He fell in love with the Land of Enchantment.
A downside about the college town of Las Cruces is that you probably won’t be able to find anything besides a Mexican eatery or mediocre Chinese takeout ─ and Denny’s.
But at the Denny’s you will see groups of students gathered around the tables sipping iced tea and chatting with their favorite professors. A lot of aerospace students and rocketry hobbyists study here. The Mexican waiter was pretty proud to tell us that his daughter was studying STEM.
Roswell is a blighted and smallish agricultural town that probably got a lot of middle class stimulus because of the Army air base located there in the 1940s. The other industry is tourism. Their McDonalds restaurant is shaped like a flying saucer. Tourism was true of the New Mexico economy in general and it is still true today.
New Mexico has the highest number of PhDs per capita than any state in the Union. This is because the population is low and because of the military bases and the Los Alamos and Sandia National Laboratories. Without government spending, and the Route 66 or other tourism, I am not sure there would have been a Middle Class in New Mexico at all.
My Dad’s Uncle (RIP) was a tailgunner in the Navy who got shot down in the Pacific by the Japs and was immediately rescued by an American submarine. After the war he was a foreman for uranium mining in Grants, New Mexico, which was a Route 66 town between Winslow, Arizona and Albuquerque, New Mexico. Grants is the seat of Cibolo County, NM.
I passed through Grants for the first time in a half-century last year after the Covid lockdown, and it is a shell of a town now. There was a dive truck stop off Interstate 40, and the old businesses and old-style buildings on Route 66 are almost all shuttered. There are quite of few ranch-style homes built in the 1950s or 1960s, but about the only jobs of substance in Grants today are related to the county government. The uranium mining industry is at quiescent levels, and the social-justice narrative now is that the White man somehow screwed over the Injuns and took a radioactive dump on their lands.
Every time an Injun gets cancer he blames the mining and not the cigarettes. They like the royalties and leases from the highways and the pipelines and the casinos ─ but somehow they think that they are owed for living on the continent. Some of the more extreme narratives are that eugenics was being practiced in the boarding schools by the White Man back in the day.
In Tucson in the 1960s or ’70s, my Uncle’s employer got a government contract to make sense of Indian epidemiological data with an algorithm from a powerful mainframe computer. It seems that the medical data that Indians gave in the hospital was always bogus and statistically useless. It was thought that some kind of program could sift logically incompatible responses to questions and that this could improve the quality of the data to improve Native American nutrition and health. Eventually they had to give up because the database was too unreliable ─ Garbage-In/Garbage-Out is a hard and fast rule, and no magic will correct it after the fact. Even if their lives and health depended on it, Indians just never told the White Man the truth if a lie served better.
They finally solved this problem, however. All the health services had to do was hire Native American girls to ask the questions.
Anyway, the United States was settled by Protestants or offshoots like the Latter-Day Saints. Three-quarters of my family are LDS and they were pioneers going back generations. One ancestor starved and died of smallpox in a Union PoW camp and another one was the Moab, Utah sheriff who was murdered by outlaws. They farmed, ranched, worked iron, and mined gold and uranium. None of them ever owned slaves.
Idaho and Utah are some of the most Anglo parts of the country today because of this earlier immigration from England, Scotland, and Wales. Most of the other White parts of the country were settled from later waves of immigration and they actually have dominant German or maybe Irish populations.
So, I realize that from a perspective of the Latin Rite or Orthodox Christians, the USA seems founded on grift and flim-flam. My great-grandfather hailed from Scottish stock from the 18th century, and in Colorado after the Civil War he was a classmate of the Washington, DC socialite Evalyn Walsh McClean. His father was a blacksmith and he mined gold in Colorado and uranium in Utah ─ but unlike the Irish-born father of the young Miss Walsh, my ancestor never “struck it rich.” Instead of the Hope Diamond, my Grandparents bought a pickup truck that ran on coal-gas.
I would object that this mercurial or exploitational view of the American West has always been shaped by Hollywood and by various adventure novels such as Zane Grey. And maybe (just maybe) that story ain’t the full truth.
After visiting Custer’s Last Stand in Montana and the Cody museum in Wyoming last year, I learned that Buffalo hides made great transmission belts for the burgeoning 19th century mills. Interesting. I remember in school that we were taught that the Buffalo were exterminated just to starve out the Plains Indians. I can concede that wildlife management is a lot more sophisticated nowadays. But it also seems to me that American Indians were pretty fond of depleting their own natural resources and then just moving on to happier hunting grounds once they filthied it up.
It has also been a suppressed academic secret that the archaeological sites of the Noble Savages prove that they did practice cannibalism whenever they won a battle or whenever the rains did not come.
The main reason that Breaking Bad was set in Albuquerque is pretty simple: Albuquerque has vastly cheaper production costs than Los Angeles for film and television.
Albuquerque was once a waypoint along Route 66 for Okies escaping the Dust Bowl to go pick fruit in California. And despite New Mexico being known for growing world-class chili peppers and the famous Albuquerque hot-air balloon festival ─ which I don’t think was even mentioned in either TV series ─ I do think that there is some truth to the stereotypes that made Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul so interesting.
There is a drug smuggling corridor along the Rio Grande River valley, which is along the modern day Interstate 25 that runs North from Las Cruces to Albuquerque to Sante Fe, and then jogs around the Eastern slope of the Rockies past Denver, Colorado and on to Northern Wyoming.
The Walter White character was a High School Chemistry teacher and tech genius who got cheated out of his share of the startup they created by his Jewish partner, Elliot Schwartz and his Jewish wife, Gretchen, who used to be Walt’s research assistant ─ and I assume that she was also Walt’s ex-girlfriend. I suspected that this was the real reason that Walt petulantly cashed out his stake of the future billion-dollar Gray Matter Technologies before it paid off.
As mentioned before, New Mexico has the most PhDs per capita than any other state in the Union because of the National Laboratories and Weapons Labs located there since WWII. There is indeed some culture of high-tech grift here, but this wildly risks overstating the case, I think, compared to Silicon Valley in California.
I will give a classic example: Harvard dropout Bill Gates and his Seattle High School buddy, Paul Allen started Microsoft in Albuquerque in 1975.
Paul Allen was hired by a technology startup called MITS which sold calculator kits and model rocketry telemetry kits to hobbyists. MITS (or Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems) was itself founded by two officers at the Weapons Laboratory at Albuquerque’s Kirtland Air Force Base.
The MITS name was deliberately meant to suggest the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) of Cambridge, Massachusetts. The MIT Provost in the 1930s was Dr. Vannevar Bush, and unlike the Ivy League schools, they emphasized Middle Class scientific and engineering focus instead. In 1941, Dr. Bush was appointed by President Roosevelt to head the OSRD or the Office of Research and Development, which birthed ideas like atomic energy and radar. Dr. Bush was the co-founder of Raytheon Technologies Corporation in 1922, which started developing refrigeration technology and then went into Electronics.
MITS (or Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems) was founded in 1969 and did not have such an illustrious pedigree as MIT or Raytheon. MITS was a project of two Albuquerque Air Force Weapons Lab officers. One was Ed Roberts, a future medical doctor who invented the first commercially successful microcomputer in 1974. When MITS was bought out in the late 1970s for a few million dollars, Roberts became a simple country doctor in Georgia.
The other Kirtland Air Force Base Weapons Laboratory officer was Forrest Mims III, a Houston, Texas-born son of an Air Force pilot whose college degree was not even in the sciences or engineering. He built an analog computer for a High School Science Fair, and his name may be familiar to those like myself who bought electronics hobbyist books from the now-defunct Radio Shack stores in the 1970s. Forrest Mims is still writing Science articles today, and his electronics reference books are essential for electronics students and hobbyists.
In the 1968s when I lived in Albuquerque, Mims was volunteering at the Model Rocketry Club at the High School a few miles away. This is what the big kids were doing in those days. At the old Army commissary building when I visited Los Alamos after the Covid lockdown last year, the youth center located there featured a Tranny Pride flag of some kind. Times have sure changed.
Anyway, MITS (again, not to be confused with the illustrious MIT) was founded in 1969 in Albuquerque and in 1975 they were paying Paul Allen about 30 thousand dollars a year to write code for them, which would be over 160 thousand in today’s dollars. Seasoned engineers at Sandia Labs like my Dad were not making much more than this.
Paul Allen and his childhood friend, the Harvard dropout, Bill Gates then contracted with MITS to write the software for the operating system of a home computer kit called the Altair ─ which was way beyond the capability of most hobbyists, and cost almost a thousand dollars in 1970s money. I remember seeing the advertisement for the Altair 8800 in the 1975 issue of Popular Electronics magazine. I didn’t like all the digital crap, though. I wondered, “Where did all the Ham Radio stuff go?”
Radio Shack soon marketed the TRS-80 home computer circa 1977, as did Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak with their Apple. In 1981, the International Business Machines corporation (IBM) contracted with Microsoft to write the software for their IBM-PC or “personal computer,” by which time Gates and Allen had left Albuquerque and skedaddled back to the Evergreen State.
Like Apple’s Steve Jobs, Bill Gates always had a flair for the monetization angle of technology. In 1976, he wrote his epic “Open Letter to Hobbyists.” Gates resented the way that hobbyist culture shared or “ripped-off” software. Microsoft negotiated their contracts to always make sure that they got their beaks wet in the operating system world and its repairs/updates. This was not unlike private firms licensing the alphabet for monetization ─ or at least this is why we have to reinvent the wheel in computing lest it become de facto public domain. Nigger Tech keeps the cash flowing to the “creators” and insures that the code is kept as inelegant as humanly possible. Getting an open-ended paycheck is what Bill Gates unironically calls “craftsmanship.”
When the late Paul Allen got his first bout with cancer in 1983, master Gates tried to buy out his stock for peanuts. Allen refused, unlike TV’s Walter White, and Allen became a billionaire when Microsoft’s stock went public.
I remember taking Electronic courses at about this time and we had great trepidation about the new computer age bringing Orwell’s long-awaited 1984 to pass. But we felt that there was no way that this would happen with the personal home computer, LOL. Each computer would be ours to own and control and not connected to any interactive government grid or corporate network. Nobody was thinking about being connected to Big Brother via the Internet in those days, LOL.
One last point about the Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul TV franchise. Note that when they want to make women seem edgy they smoke cigarettes. Jesse’s girlfriend, Jane does this but then she is also a heroin user.
Skyler White takes up smoking as soon as she can after her “surprise” baby is born. Skyler wanted to make her own way professionally and she seemed to be in some sense in competition with Walt about how clever she is. When Walt “breaks bad” she knows that something is up with him and starts an affair with her ex boss whom she does not even respect, although he is a good single Dad.
Likewise, Kim Wexler is one of the cool kids and smokes while on breaks with Jimmy McGill at the HHM law-firm. I think she mostly gives up smoking when she quit practicing the law and left Jimmy/Saul for the pedestrian lifestyle at the lawn care company in Florida. Her sandals-and-white-socks boyfriend is a bit too bland to be believable, and I almost found it offensive writing. Is this supposed to be Kim’s post-Albuquerque penance for having been a bitch? Having a good cry on the airport shuttle bus makes it all better.
I am not sure if giving characters a cigarette habit is just lazy writing these days, but it is a quick way to make somebody decent seem edgy and transgressive, I guess.
Skyler’s nurse sister didn’t smoke as far as I can remember, but Marie was a liar and a kleptomaniac until Skyler started to get implicated in Walter’s vices, and her DEA agent husband Hank got shot and had to be taken care of. While convalescing, Hank did not collect rocks; he collected “minerals.” He acts like the tough secret agent but is in really a local nerd at heart.
I do sometimes like the way that Hollywood portrays White Trash in a realistic and not too judgmental way. At least, sometimes I do. The Coen Brothers films sometimes do this intelligently and humorously. But not always.
I am not sure they are being so explicit with Skyler, Marie, Hank, Kim Wexler, Mike Ehrmantraut (the principled but dirty ex-cop) or Werner Ziegler (the compromised German contractor and his naïve German wife, Margarethe) and so on.
But on some level aren’t they saying that the Gentiles of the American heartland ─ plus the Germans who do business with them ─ are basically high-agency White Trash?
Take Peter Schuler, a high executive for Madrigal Electromotive, the German company that distributes the American methamphetamine, He was busy evaluating dipping sauces as part of some marketing study at the office when he learns that the police are there to question him in the “Heisenberg” case, so he runs to the John and immediately commits suicide with a heart defibrillator kit.
I am not sure if this reminds me more of Al Bundy, the fictional TV born loser who sold women’s shoes ─ or the Jewish pedo-trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, who somehow taught at a NY college prep school without having a college degree, and who was found hanged in his prison cell a month after his arrest.
I am not sure if this is the “American Story” or not, but Bill Gates and Paul Allen became billionaires ─ while Ed Roberts and Forrest Mims, who as far as I’m concerned had greater talent, did not.
🙂
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